Jim Brown Doesn`t Stay In Bounds With Memoir

September 24, 1989|By MEGAN ROSENFELD, The Washington Post

Jim Brown walks like something`s hurting him. Maybe it`s the pointy-toed black snakeskin cowboy boots. Maybe it`s an old football injury. Or could one of his numerous girlfriends have delivered a well-placed kick?

``I just walk funny,`` he said. He always gets out of cars slowly, so as not to pull anything.

Is it possible the man is showing a few signs of age? It doesn`t look as though Father Time has exactly stomped on him with cleats, but there are a few telltale shadows of life evident on the former Playgirl centerfold, who, after all, is now 52. (He said. Biographical listings give his birth date as Feb. 17, 1936.) The chest hairs peeking over the black tank top are flecked with gray, and the top of his forehead is now farther from his eyebrows than it was in either his football hero or acting days. Is he getting a tad overripe?

Brown is fond of grocery metaphors when it comes to women, whom he is very fond of if they fit into a certain type. ``I prefer girls who are young,`` he says in Out of Bounds, his hot-off-the-press memoir. ``When I eat a peach, I don`t want it overripe. I want that peach when it`s peaking.``

He admits in the book to following a double standard, to having a ``Main Girlfriend`` that you take out in public or to a Main Girlfriend party like the ones the black guys on the Cleveland Browns used to throw at Headquarters, a house they rented for partying. At these parties everyone dressed up, arrived by limo, ate well and danced slow. These were not the women invited to other kinds of parties, such as ``The Night of a Thousand Fingers.`` Those were called freaks, the ones who came to the other kinds of parties, where ``we`d all bring two or three girls. You couldn`t lock any doors, couldn`t hold any chicks back. Those pretty girls from Cleveland were allowed to express themselves freely and creatively.``

He knows, but he laughs. True, the laugh is a little tight, perhaps embarrassed, but basically, he said in an interview, he just is the way he is. ``It`s just my sexuality,`` he said. ``Everybody likes something.``

Actually, Out of Bounds is not a book in the traditional sense, because it was not written so much as talked. Brown and a collaborator, Steve Delsohn, then edited the tapes down to book length. The result is a sort of extended locker room monologue -- profane, outrageous, one-sided and occasionally thought-provoking. It is full of unexplained references and confusing allusions, but it also contains some frank character assessments and self- appraisal. It is Jim Brown`s take on Jim Brown, his version of the way things were, his platform. He wrote it because he was not happy with his first book, Off My Chest, also written with a collaborator.

``It reflects my life honestly,`` he said. ``It might shock you but if you read the whole book you might see I have a very individual point of view.``

His point of view, as reflected in the book and an interview, seems to be that of a combination radical black militant, sexual libertine and traditional Republican capitalist. On the one hand, he spoke at Huey Newton`s funeral; has been friends with Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan; and has always, even as a young football player in the 1960s, been an out-front activist. On the other hand, he is against government programs that increase dependence and thinks the only way blacks will alleviate the ``symptoms`` -- substance abuse, black-on-black crime, poverty -- is to solve the problem of economic impotence.

And guess what. He had an affair with Gloria Steinem! Or so he says in the book.

Of course that was back in 1968, and the only reason he wrote about it was in connection with the Eva Bohn-Chin affair. She was the woman, half-German, half-Jamaican, whom he met in London while filming The Dirty Dozen and who police later said he threw off a balcony in Los Angeles. What really happened, Brown says in the book, is that Bohn-Chin was jealous over his fling with Steinem, whom he met while she was doing a magazine profile of him while he was filming in Arizona. Bohn-Chin left his apartment -- with Brown`s car -- and went to stay with a girlfriend, with whom, Brown suspected, she also was involved sexually. He talked Bohn-Chin into coming home, and they planned a playful evening with three other women, including the girlfriend.